


you and me (and her and him) and the war at the end times

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Justice League Task Force, The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (cisco and cindy), Alien Invasion, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Comic Book References, Comic Book Science, Developing Relationship, Multi, Polyamory Negotiations, Trans Characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 03:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14608053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Cisco loves Barry and Iris. Barry and Iris love each other, and also Cisco. Cynthia loves Cisco and Iris and maybe Barry. Cisco and Iris and maybe Barry love her, too. And on top of all ofthatthere's an alien invasion.Or, sometimes one plus one plus one plus one equals one.





	you and me (and her and him) and the war at the end times

**Author's Note:**

  * For [buckybunnyteeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckybunnyteeth/gifts).



> I've been working on this for months now, and I hope Sarah enjoys it, since at the end of the day this is a thank you gift to her for giving me something to read when I'm sad. 
> 
> The background relationships are Will/Ray, Ralph/Sue, Joe/Cecile, and although it's not super specified, Avery/Mingming. The title is a play on a lyric from Calamity Song by the Decemberists. This fic is also kinda my way of fixing some things the Flash got wrong-the wonderful Sue Dearbon actually _exists_ for example. Will and Ray (who I imagine as looking like Han Hyun Min) and their relationship to Cindy, and her relationship with H'ronmeer, all come from Justice League Task Force.
> 
> Warnings for violence, injury, aliens committing suicide, fears of forced outing, and death. As always, let me know if there's anything I forgot.

Cisco brings it up to her first. He’s curled up with Cynthia on the couch while one of the Star Wars films plays in the background. She has her head tucked up underneath his chin, nose buried in his neck. It was a bad day for them both, and it’s nice to just focus on something else while being in close proximity to each other. Physically, they can’t be there for each other very often, and emotionally it’s difficult for Cynthia to talk about her feelings and say the right thing when it comes to Cisco’s. So they do this often. This… Existing in proximity without talking to each other.

Cynthia adjusts her position with a little sigh when the credits roll, rolling so her back is pressing against Cisco’s side and taking his hand in hers. He doesn’t bother reaching for the remote to turn the TV off, since they’re both too comfortable right now for that. Instead he sighs a little and looks down at her, pressing his nose and forehead into her curly dark hair.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he says softly. It’s almost inaudible over the sound of the movie credits. He takes a deep breath and sighs, which she feels on the back of her head rather than hearing it. “It’s kind of serious.”

“What kind of serious?” Cynthia bites her lower lip. They’ve gotten better about communication and it’s good enough that  _ usually  _ when Cisco brings up that he has something to talk about her mind doesn’t immediately go to  _ he’s breaking up with me,  _ but there’s still that anxiety there. That one day Cisco will come to his senses and realize that she’s not good enough for him and she never was.

“Like, really serious.” He sighs again and looks at the credits, counting the names. They’re going through the makeup department now. “I think…” He swallows loudly and feels Cynthia tense up in his arms. Cisco squeezes her, hoping his attempt at being reassuring works. “I think I’m in love with my best friends.”

Cynthia stays still, fighting down the stabbing hurt in her stomach. Breathe, breathe, breathe, this will pass. She knew this would happen eventually. She  _ knew  _ Cisco would realize that he had been wrong to choose her eventually. “What?”

“Barry and Iris,” Cisco says honestly as he closes his eyes. “I think I’m in love with them.” At Cynthia’s sharp intake of breath through her teeth, he rushes to fix his mistake. “I love you too! More than anything, I swear to God-but I realized a few nights ago that-that you’re not the only person I love. And I didn’t think it would be right for me not to tell you.”

For a moment, all Cynthia can think is  _ thank God, he still loves me.  _ She shakes her head a little and tries to focus. “You-” She lets out a weak little laugh and cradles her head in her hands. “Oh, Cisco. I thought you’d already dated them.”

“What?” Cisco sits up more on the couch and turns to face her fully, moving so he’s sitting on his knees and looking at her with wide brown eyes. “You-this whole time, you thought I was also dating Barry and Iris?”

“No, no,” Cynthia corrects. “I thought you  _ had  _ dated them. And then broke up with them. Because of how they look at you when you’re not looking.” Neither Cynthia nor Cisco are good at reading the faces and body language of the people around them, although Cynthia is much better at it since she’s forced herself to learn how to. But it’d be impossible to miss the way that Barry and Iris look at Cisco when he’s not looking at them. She’d just assumed he’d dated both of them separately before.

Cisco gapes at her. His hand comes up to pinch the bridge of his nose and changes destination to clasp his forehead part of the way through. “I-no, we haven’t dated, or at least neither of them have dated me, since they’re both… You know… Married. And-wait a second. ‘How they look at me’?” He shakes his head. “Were my two  _ married  _ best friends who I’m in love with in love with me without me even noticing?”

“I think they are,” Cynthia admits as she shifts and hugs her knees up to her chest. The two of them look at each other for a second. Cisco takes a few breaths and squeezes his own knees tightly. Cynthia interrupts him when he opens his mouth to say something before he can get any words out. “I think they are, and I think you should go for it.”

She’s being honest. Now that she knows what this is… Barry and Iris make Cisco happy. Cynthia can’t always be around, because of work and because of how volatile they can sometimes be around each other. Cisco makes her powers sing and she makes his expand and that’s a dangerous combination for people like them. The more she thinks about it, the more it makes sense for Cisco to try to seek out a romantic relationship with Barry and Iris.

They care about him. Like Cynthia cares about him. Like Cisco more than deserves to be cared about. Cynthia hugs her knees tighter. Cisco deserves to be happy. Barry and Iris will make him happy. Barry and Iris deserve to be happy even if she doesn’t really know them. Cisco will make Barry and Iris happy. It’s simple.

“...You really think I should?” Cisco asks weakly. He looks away. The movie has stopped playing by now and his TV has turned off, so he just stares into the dark screen. “Listen, I-Cindy, I know there’s some stuff you haven’t told me about the people you’ve dated.” Cynthia stiffens. “Which is  _ fine,  _ you don’t have to and you don’t ever have to, I just-I don’t want you to think you have to do this, or something.”

Cynthia rests her chin on her knees. “Cisco, trust me. Whatever problems I’ve had with my exes, I’m not saying I think you should do this because of them. Okay? I promise. I want you to go for it because you deserve to be happy and this will make you happy.”

Cisco leans forward and takes her hands in his, pressing their foreheads together. For a moment they stay like that without saying anything, both of them completely silent except for their breathing as they look at each other, neither of them quite making eye contact. “Do you really think I should ask them?” Cynthia nods almost imperceptibly and Cisco swallows. “...Can you be there? When I do?”

“Of course.” She leans up and closes the gap between them quickly enough to kiss Cisco on the nose before he has a chance to react. It makes his whole face scrunch up in a smile. Something inside of Cynthia’s chest hurts in the good way when she sees it. “When are you going to do it?”

“No idea,” he admits. “I don’t think I can for awhile. It took me a long time to admit to myself that I-that I loved them, you know? I think it’ll take… Maybe not  _ as _ long, but still a long time for me to tell them that I realized that.”

“Okay.” Cynthia keeps their foreheads pressed together. “Can I stay tonight?”

She’s gotten into the habit of asking. The answer is always yes, but it feels nice to ask anyway. It makes them both feel better.

“‘Course you can.”  _ He _ kisses  _ her _ nose this time and laughs when she blinks at him with wide eyes. “God, I’m exhausted.” Cisco quiets. “Thank you for being so understanding. I don’t want you to think I love you any  _ less  _ just because I love Barry and Iris, too. Just because I’ve known them longer-loved them longer-it doesn’t mean I don’t still love you. More than anything.”

“I know,” Cynthia says softly. What else can she say? It’s the truth. She can feel it. “I-” Cynthia looks away. She won’t voice her fears right now. The fears about how it’ll change things if Iris and Barry say yes. She wants Cisco to be happy, she really, really does, but-what if this fails? What if she doesn’t fit in? What if Cynthia was wrong about Iris and Barry loving Cisco the way that they do? What if this hurts Cisco, somehow? “I know.”

It’s not until she’s in Cisco’s bed that she realizes what the problem is-she doesn’t  _ know  _ Iris. She doesn’t  _ know  _ Barry. Until she knows them, she’ll never feel completely comfortable with them dating Cisco. It’s selfish. Cisco knows them. Cisco loves them. Cisco’s feelings are the ones that matter in this situation, not hers.

“I know that look,” Cisco sighs as he climbs into the bed with her. He kisses her forehead. “You’re making that face you make when you’re frustrated.”

“I don’t have a face I make when I’m frustrated.” Cynthia wriggles away from Cisco so he has room to get into the bed next to her, which he does. He wraps her arms around her and pulls her close to his chest. She frowns into his neck and mumbles, “Collectors are trained not to have any tells.”

“And my Abuela taught Dante to have a perfect poker face, but I can still tell when he’s lying,” Cisco says gently. Cynthia huffs. It tickles Cisco’s chest. “When I’m around people for long enough, and when I care about them enough to notice that sort of thing, I can tell when they’re lying. Or thinking about something. Or angry, even if they’re trying to hide it. It’s a skill.”

“An annoying skill,” Cynthia grumbles. Cisco doesn’t say anything. He knows this is just something she does when there’s something he wants to know that she isn’t telling him. When she wants to, she’ll tell him. Not a moment sooner. “...I want to get to know Barry and Iris better. You can still ask them if they want to be with you. But I want to get to know them. Before or after you ask, it doesn’t really matter.”

Cynthia doesn’t say the rest of it. That even though she’s pretty sure Barry will never be anything romantically to her, from what she  _ has  _ seen of Iris… Cynthia knows her type, okay? It’s the type that’s willing to stare her in the eye and tell her when she’s going too far. Cisco can do it, even if he doesn’t think he can, not really. Iris… Iris is the boss. Cynthia’s always known that. Maybe before everyone else. It’s her job to read people. To know more about them than they know about themselves. So she can take them down.

Not that she would  _ ever  _ take Iris down. She means too much to Cisco for Cynthia to do that. Just like Cynthia would never be able to take Cisco down. Barry… Maybe, if he got too out of line. But then again, considering how much she knows Barry loves Cisco and how much she now knows Cisco loves Barry… Maybe not. It’s too many ‘maybes’ for her taste. Too many unknowns. It unnerves her.

She shivers a little. Cisco feels it and makes a noise of concern that’s accompanied by a soothing vibration that ripples through her torso. Same frequency as a cat’s purring. That’s… Sweet, that he would do that. 

“What’re you thinking about?” Cisco squeezes her to bring her back to reality. That’s how they ground each other. Cisco’s meltdowns-the milder ones, when she can touch him, when he’s not spiraling at the same time-and her breakdowns. Squeezing helps. Cynthia’s always known it, ever since her father pulled her into a tight hug when she was nine and she immediately felt better. Cynthia helped Cisco to rediscover it after forgetting how nice it felt. “And of  _ course  _ you can get to know them, Cindy. They’re going to love you.”

She’s almost afraid of how right he might end up being about that. “Iris. I think I could learn to love her. Like you do.”

“Not Barry?” Cisco doesn’t sound accusing. Just tired. Tired and expectant. This was a hard day for both of them, for very different reasons.

“I don’t know. Maybe if he’s full of surprises.” There’s that ‘maybe’ again. Dammit. Cisco was enough of a ‘maybe’ for her. He really was.

Cisco laughs. It’s a little bit weak. He told her about his day earlier, about how exhausting it was to deal with Wells and how his nerves felt this close to snapping all day. Now she knows it was also because of the weight of what he wanted to tell her. It makes her own reasons-her father getting on her case for breaking the law yet again-feel trivial by comparison. Arguments with her father pass, they always do. 

“You should tell them your name soon,” Cisco says softly. “I know it was hard for you to tell me, and I get that, and I get  _ why  _ it was hard for you, but I really, really think you should tell them your name. That’ll be the first barrier the three of you break down, y’know?”

Cynthia stays silent for a long, long time. She hears Cisco’s breathing even out as he drifts off to sleep. She closes her eyes. Logically, she knows he’s right-there’s no reason for them not to know her real name. Not to know her by something other than the cruel codename she was assigned at age eighteen and has never been able to shake no matter how many times she’s petitioned the Council for it to be changed. She  _ despises  _ it, so why is she so attached to it?

Well, she knows why. Knows it’s because even if she hates it, it’s something that’s  _ hers,  _ something that’s never belonged to anybody else and never will. It’s no more hers than the name she chose for herself at age seven when her father told her it meant  _ huntress,  _ but that name still feels awkward on her tongue. Names are something she’s always had a difficult relationship with. That doesn’t mean she has to admit that to herself every time she looks in the mirror or introduces herself, though, does it?

However, if Barry and Iris are going to trust her, if they’re going to accept her as a part of this relationship and on equal footing to the both of them (and who’s to say they will once they know her name?), then they should know it. They’ll never know the dead and buried name that she was born with, just like Cisco never will and just like she’ll never know Cisco’s, but they should know her real name.

So she stomps into the Cortex about a week later, relishing in the hefty sound it makes when her boots hit the floor and how nice it feels in her body. She nods to the nice younger speedster- _ Kid Flash,  _ even though he grumbles and complains that he’s not a  _ kid.  _ Real name is Wally. She doesn’t usually call him Wally in her head. He beams and waves back at her despite the stormy expression on her face. Good kid.

Iris looks up at her as she comes marching over, twining her hand with Barry’s. Cynthia tries not to take it as-as some sort of threat, or a reaction to danger, or something. She tells her brain to slow down and stop reading people for just  _ one second,  _ to calm down and stop fighting like a wasp underneath a glass for just  _ one second.  _ Just a little while.

“Hey,” Barry says, a little bit cautiously. “We haven’t seen you around in a little while. How’re you doing?”

He exchanges an awkward glance with Iris. Cynthia crosses her arms over her chest. It’s a squeezing self-comfort in disguise. “I’m fine.”

“If you’re looking for Cisco, he’s down the hall working on a project,” Iris informs her. She’s got that same gleam in her eye that Cisco gets when he’s trying to figure out a particularly difficult puzzle. This time, Cynthia realizes,  _ she’s  _ the puzzle that someone is trying to solve. Cynthia nods a little bit and Iris relaxes her shoulders ever-so-slightly, content that that’s what Cynthia wanted to know. “I’m sure he’s missed you, G-”

“Cynthia,” she interrupts before she can stop herself. Iris pauses and looks at her. Cynthia uncrosses her arms and clenches her fists down by her sides. “That’s my name. Call me by my name. It’s Cynthia.” She looks at the floor and chews on the inside of her cheek. “Cisco calls me ‘Cindy’.”

“...Cynthia?” Barry frowns a little. “Huh. Well. Okay. Um, thank you for telling us?”

Cynthia desperately wishes that she were anywhere but there. “You’re… You’re welcome.”

Iris is back to looking at her like she’s a puzzle to be solved. It makes her skin itch. The silence gets longer, Iris inspecting her and Cynthia trying desperately not to give in to her desire to open a breach and get the  _ hell  _ out of there. She compromises by turning around and marching out just as loudly as she came in, this time ignoring Wally-Kid-Flash’s wide smile and wave of goodbye.

She heads for Cisco’s workroom and sits on his desk. He’s not there, probably in the bathroom or getting a snack or something, so she has a minute to compose herself and take a few deep breaths before anyone can see her.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were in this.” She looks up at the sound of Cisco’s voice as he comes back in. He beams at her. “Should’ve known. I think they could’ve heard you stomping in the halls all the way back on Earth-19.”

Cynthia smiles back at him, a little weakly. “I told Barry and Iris my name. And Kid-Wally was in the room, so… He knows too.”

His grin gets even bigger and his eyes light up as he rushes over and peppers her face with kisses. “Really? That’s  _ great!  _ I-thank you. Thank you for telling them. I know you probably didn’t want to and-thank you. So much.”

She melts into him. “I think I like Iris.”

Really, if she’s being totally honest, Cynthia’s got no idea if the knots in her chest that Iris made are from fear or anxiety or understanding or affection or  _ what,  _ but she’s pretty sure she likes her. And she knows Cisco wants her to like her. So that’s what she tells him. It’s truthful enough that it’s not a lie.

“I’m glad.” Cisco kisses her jaw. “She’s very likeable.”

Cynthia can’t argue with that. 

It takes a month of deliberation for Cisco to tell Barry and Iris how he feels about them. He invites them over and sits them down on his couch with some soda and tells them he needs to get something off his chest.

Cynthia’s there as promised, watching Barry and Iris-especially Iris, since she’s much more subtle than her husband is-for any signs of anger or disgust. There’s none. Instead, Barry’s eyes light up and his entire face turns into a smile and he throws himself at Cisco. Cisco flinches automatically, holding up his arms to shove Barry away, but Barry just drags him into a tight hug.

Iris laughs a little at the shocked expression on Cisco’s face as Barry babbles on and on at super speed apparently oblivious to the fact that he’s utterly incomprehensible to the rest of them. “I think what Barry is trying to tell you in his own, ah, unique way, is that he and I… Well, we both really like you too,” she says gently. “I think it’s in the same way that you like us.”

“That’s what Cindy said,” Cisco tells her, voice muffled by the fact that Barry’s shoulder is practically inside of his mouth. “Barry, I-I’m having a little bit of trouble breathing-”

Barry lets go of him quickly, eyes still gleaming and flickering a little with lightning. He looks at Cynthia and she sticks out her chin a little. “Neither of you are subtle about your feelings for Cisco,” she tells him. “Neither of you, but  _ especially  _ not  _ you.” _

Barry turns as red as his suit and mumbles something under his breath that Cynthia doesn’t catch before he looks at her and frowns. “Wait, you knew we were-” He looks at Iris before sighing. “You knew we were in love with Cisco? This whole time?”

“I don’t know how Cisco could’ve possibly missed it,” Cynthia says dryly, rolling her eyes a little. “Like I said, you’re not subtle.”

“But you’re… You’re okay with it?” Barry looks back and forth between Cisco and Cynthia. “This isn’t, like, a threatening meeting or anything, is it? Cisco, you’re not telling us you like us-like, romantically like us-only for your girlfriend and you to kill us because-”

Iris sets her hand on his and squeezes it. “Barry, honey? Breathe.” She looks at Cisco. “I think, if you’re willing-” She shakes her head and corrects herself. “I’m sorry. If  _ both  _ of you are willing, then I think both Barry and me would like to at least try to have a relationship with you.” Iris sounds like she’s been thinking this over and writing it out in her head. “We both like you a lot- _ love  _ you a lot. And Cindy, if you’re okay with it too…”

“If Cisco wants to have a relationship with you, then I’m okay with it,” Cynthia tells them both softly. Cisco squeezes her knee. “I don’t know the two of you as well as he does. But you make him happy. And I think-” She looks at Cisco and swallows past the tightness in her throat and stubbornly blinks away the sudden blurriness in her vision. “And I think maybe one day you could make me happy, too.”

The grip Cisco has on her leg suddenly gets even tighter, and she knows that this is his own nonverbal way of telling her how much that means to him. Barry looks like he’s unsure of whether or not he should hug her, too. Iris inspects her, looking her up and down, and Cynthia knows that she’s looking at the wall of secrets between the two of them and planning on how she’ll knock it down or pick the lock on the heavy iron door.

“Are the two of you free tonight?” Cisco asks hopefully. “I know it’s, like, really short notice, but we could… Go out, do something. Like a date. Cynthia has to head back home in, like, an hour, so…”

“I’m not,” Barry says regretfully. He looks at his wife. “But Iris-”

“I am.” Iris smiles. Something in Cynthia’s stomach twists a little. That  _ smile.  _ She doesn’t even  _ know  _ Iris, how come it can do that to her? “I’d love to go on a date with you, Cisco.”

Cynthia keeps track of Cisco from Earth-19 later that night. Not out of concern that Iris will do something to him, something to hurt him, but out of concern that something will happen to ruin their night together. Nothing does, though. She feels the fluttering of his heart and the humming of his frequency get a little bit frantic part of the way through but before she can go do anything to help him it calms and she decides it was just anxiety, not a supervillain attack or something like that.

She comes to visit him the next morning. He tells her, over eggs, that the date with Iris went great. They went to see a movie together, since that’s a lot easier than making a dinner reservation so last-minute. They sat together and whispered to each other during the movie until the people behind them  _ and  _ the people in front of them shushed them. It was a movie neither of them had seen before. And it was  _ nice  _ and it was just like going out with her as a friend except that the invisible barrier had been lifted and he walked her back to the loft she and Barry share because it was a nice night and it had been  _ perfect. _

Cynthia searches herself for jealousy and is honest with Cisco when she tells him that she is  _ so glad  _ they had fun. Something inside of her feels weird but it’s not jealousy-she knows how she is when she gets jealous, which is how she knows that what she’s feeling isn’t jealousy. It’s something else. She’s not sure  _ what  _ it is, but it’s not jealousy.

“I’ve got a few hours before I should be at STAR Labs,” Cisco hums, pushing his nose into Cynthia’s collarbone. She tugs him closer, pulling him closer with her legs. She’s sitting on his kitchen counter-he says that it’s cute how she likes to sit up on things and be as tall as she possibly can be. Like she’s trying to gain back the height that genetics denied her. He pauses. She knows what he’s asking.

“Yeah,” she answers, nodding to make sure the message gets across. She can feel Cisco smile into her neck and pushes him down a little, spreading her legs slightly so he has the room to follow.

He raises an eyebrow and looks up at her. “Did you wear one of my shirts on purpose? And-hell, did you  _ steal  _ that?”

Cynthia bats her eyelashes at him. Technically she didn’t wear it on purpose, but she knows he likes it when she wears his clothes  _ and  _ all of his clothes are exceedingly comfortable, so whenever it’s safe for her to wear them she puts them on without even thinking about it. “Is it stealing if I was always planning on giving it back?”

Cisco clicks his tongue and kisses her stomach with a playful grin, right on the bottom of the graphic of a pair of crossed cutlasses. “No way were you planning on giving it back, Cindy. I know you. Don’t think I didn’t notice that my conditioner mysteriously disappeared after the last time you showered in my bathroom.”

“We were  _ both  _ showering at the same time,” Cynthia points out, bending over to cup Cisco’s face. Cisco makes a little impressed noise. It’s not exactly a  _ huge  _ show of flexibility, but it’s still extremely impressive to him, considering he can’t even touch his toes through no fault of his own (instead it comes from his father’s bone structure). “How do you think I could’ve managed to steal it without you noticing?”

Oh, she  _ had  _ taken it. Cisco could always get more and the brand didn’t exist on Earth-19. Plus, it reminded her of Cisco. She just wanted to see if he could prove that she could. Cisco stares at her. “Who  _ else  _ would’ve even had the  _ opportunity  _ to take it?”

“So are you just trying to tease me now?” Cynthia sits up and pushes lightly on his shoulders again.  _ “You’re  _ the one with a time limit who needs to be at work soon, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Something buzzes and then chimes, and Cisco groans a little. Cynthia snaps his phone off the counter and answers it without checking to see who the caller is. “Who is this?”

“Cisco-wait, hey-hey, Cynthia, nice to-” There’s a loud static noise on the other side and Barry’s voice cuts out before returning, sounding more raspy this time. “There’s this-this  _ something _ attacking STAR Labs and we  _ need  _ Cisco down here  _ right now.” _

“He’s about to be very busy,” Cynthia says shortly, fingers digging into Cisco’s shoulders. “Call back later.”

“No, seriously, we need him-or you! You’ve got the same powers, I’m sure you’d work too!” Barry sounds like he’s getting more and more desperate. “Look, I-we  _ really  _ need help over here, we can’t tell what this thing is or what it wants or what’s going  _ on.  _ But we need some serious backup and it’s not like any of my friends from Star City can get over here in time to help us, so-”

“Fine,” Cynthia groans, “we’re on our way. But only because I know Cisco loves you.” She hangs up and looks down at Cisco, who’s long since pulled back and is watching her with wide, worried eyes. “That was Barry.” She hands him his phone and climbs off the counter, pulling her pants back up. She’s not in uniform, but… They were bound to see her in civilian clothes sometime, right? “You’re needed at work.”

He’s protesting that he’s still in pajamas even as she pulls him through a breach, watching him shiver in the parking lot of STAR Labs since apparently the sun, which was peeking through Cisco’s kitchen window a second ago, has ducked behind a cloud. Annoyance makes her grit her teeth. She thought that Cisco’s teammates would be strong enough to be able to handle one measly metahuman criminal on their own. Evidently, she was wrong.

And then Cisco screams and pulls her out of the way as something massive-a car?-crashes down where she was standing a second before.

They both look up at STAR Labs at the same time and realize that it’s not a cloudy day at all. The thing attacking the lab is just so monumentally massive that it’s blocking out the sun. Cynthia swallows. No wonder Barry couldn’t handle it. Fuck. Now she regrets telling him to handle it on his own.

“What the  _ hell  _ is that thing?” Cisco whispers, clinging to her hand in a deathgrip.

Cynthia looks at the rippling purple and red skin of the thing. Looks at its fat tentacles gripping the sides and roof of STAR Labs and squeezing it. The thick veins running through the translucent guts of the monster. She squeezes Cisco’s hand tightly and swallows.

“Imperium,” she breathes, not daring to speak up any louder it case it notices and throws another car at them. “It’s-it’s Imperium.”

“It’s what?” Cisco blinks at her, eyes huge. “Imperium?” She nods silently, heart hammering in her throat. She feels like she can’t breathe. This morning had started out so  _ good. _ “What’s that? And how do we stop it before it kills everyone inside the lab?”

“I don’t-” She shakes her head and tries to remember the lessons her father taught her. “Sunlight. Sunlight hurts it. But it’s out here in broad daylight-there has to be something it  _ wants.  _ Look at how it’s smoking!” Cisco’s gaze follows where she’s pointing. The Imperium is healing as fast as it’s getting injured, the massive bubbling rash on its back that grows everywhere the sun hits it bleeding and oozing pus only to get covered by an even thicker layer of skin. “I’ve never fought one before.”

“I’ll-I’ll breach everyone out of the lab, we’ll see if we can stop this thing before it kills everyone else in the city after it’s finished with STAR Labs.” Cisco shudders. “Okay. Okay. You try to keep it distracted, alright? Is it even  _ possible  _ to distract that thing?”

“I’ll find out.” Cynthia swallows. She keeps her gaze on the Imperium as Cisco breaches off beside her. She’s  _ never  _ faced the Imperium before. The one from her universe is long dead, killed by her fathers and an angry old god. But she’s run training simulations against monsters like them before. It shouldn’t be  _ too  _ difficult, right?

The voice in her head reminds her that every single one of those simulations was a designed-to-fail one. She tells herself to shut up. Her fathers killed an Imperium once. She can kill one now. Yes, Cisco may have told her to keep it distracted, but there’s no way to get rid of an Imperium without killing them. Her stomach clenches as she realizes that its ‘walkers’ may have already landed in other places on Earth. This is an infestation.

Now if only she could figure out why they’re trying to attack STAR Labs… Usually they go after cities. Central  _ is  _ sizable but not to the level of Gotham or New York or Metropolis. Maybe they don’t have a Gotham or a Metropolis here. Maybe it’s because of Barry. Or maybe… Or maybe it’s because of Cisco. If it is, she’ll make this Imperium regret ever even thinking about coming here.

It can’t see or hear her, so there’s no point in taunting it, but it can  _ definitely  _ feel the trio of blasts that she sends slamming into it. It screams out in a thousand agonized voices as Cynthia senses rather than sees that Cisco has sent everyone through a breach to someplace across the city. Good. She wonders if they can see the Imperium from there, its massive tendrils relinquishing their grip on STAR Labs. It must have been after one of the people inside of it, then.

Cynthia digs her heels into the ground and blasts it again. This isn’t like before, when the sunlight hurt it, when her fathers and the gods could fight the Imperium back and destroy it before it could take any more lives. When the sunlight had razed the Earth and killed the rest of their hidden troops. She’s the only one facing this down. She knows what can kill it. Knows how to destroy it. It won’t destroy its troops and won’t fix whatever it is that brought it here in the first place, but it’ll hold them off for the time being. One the mothership of the Imperium is destroyed, the ground forces will be disorganized.

It’s an easy decision to make. Especially once Cynthia thinks of Cisco. Hell, after she thinks of Cisco, it’s the easiest choice in the whole damn world. She closes her eyes and prays to another world’s god and hopes that ze is listening and opens her eyes to a world of fire.

By the time Cisco and Barry and Wally get there, the fight is over. Cisco rushes to her side, frantically wiping at the blood dribbling out of her mouth. “Cindy! Are you okay? Thank  _ god  _ you’re alive, we saw the-the…” He trails off and looks around. “We saw the explosion from all the way in the badlands…”

The Imperium is destroyed around her, bloody chunks of pulsating goo scattered everywhere while a thin sheen of blood coats her from head to toe. STAR Labs is destroyed, leveled to the Earth. Barry makes a small distressed sound when he sees it. Wally gapes at her and then smiles encouragingly, although it’s ever-so-slightly forced. Cisco grips her hand.

“Cindy?” She stares back at him blankly, breathing shallow. Cisco shakes her a little, frantic. His voice takes on a hysterical edge. “Cindy, what-what are you doing? Cindy? Wake  _ up!  _ Cindy! Barry,  _ something’s wrong with-” _

“Breathe,” Barry says, pulling Cisco close against him. Cisco buries his nose in his friend’s-his  _ boyfriend’s?- _ chest. Wally doesn’t comment on it, although he does file it away or later. Barry smoothes down Cisco’s hair. “Breathe, Cisco. It’s-it’s okay, she’ll be okay-Wally, you know where Cisco’s apartment is, right? Bring Cynthia there. I’ll bring everyone else back there and we’ll try to-we’ll try to-” He shrugs a little helplessly. “We’ll try to figure this shit out.”

Cynthia comes to in warm water turned pink by the blood washed off her body. Cisco’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub looking down at her with concern, and he starts crying when he sees life flicker back into her warm brown eyes. Almost slipping and falling into the bath himself, he bends down to press their foreheads together.

She doesn’t even register his frantic questions at first, too preoccupied with the feeling of the water around her. Water. So different from fire… So different from her. Cisco’s the water. She’s the fire. Dangerous, both of them, but completely and totally necessary for the survival of the ecosystem. She draws her knees up to her chest and starts laughing.

“Ze let me go,” she whispers through her laughter, looking at Cisco. “Ze let me go. I didn’t think ze would.”

“Ze? Who’s ze? That monster? The Imperium?” Cisco cups her face, body twisted awkwardly so he won’t end up in the tub with her. “Are you okay? I thought you were-there was something  _ wrong _ with you, you weren’t responding and you were so bloody and I was so afraid and I don’t know what we’d do if you died-we’re all here, everyone’s in my living room on the couch-Barry and Iris and Wally and Joe and Cecile and Caitlin and Ralph and Sue and  _ everyone-” _

Cynthia’s fear catches up to her so fast it’s dizzying. “Did they see?” She demands, sitting up straighter to grip the front of Cisco’s shirt, eyes wide with anxiety. “Did they-Cisco, did they see? Tell me if they saw that I-that I’m-” She chokes on the words. They’ll find out one day, or at least Barry and Iris will, but she can’t-she can’t get outed, not like  _ that,  _ it has to be on  _ her terms- _ “Please.”

“If they saw?” Cisco frowns and then realizes, eyes widening. “Oh, no, I promise, they didn’t. I’m the one who got you undressed. Caitlin said you weren’t in shock, it was something else, and I needed to get the blood off you, but I couldn’t let them… I know, okay? I’ll never do that. Like I know you wouldn’t if it was me. I love you.”

“Thank you. God. Thank you.” She rests her hand on her knee and then looks up at Cisco, struggling to breathe through her relief. “I have some good news, and I have some bad news.” She waits for him to nod and gesture for her to continue. “The good news is that the Imperium is the greatest threat, and now it is gone. The bad news is that its foot soldiers live on, although they’re easily killed by ultraviolet radiation. The rest of the bad news is that I’m all out of prayers to dead Martian gods.”

To Cisco’s endless credit, he doesn’t even ask.

Barry, when they tell him and the others, does. “Dead Martian gods?”

Cynthia’s skin burns with the hidden fire in her lungs and she closes her eyes slowly. “I died once,” she says simply. There’s a ripple of shock that spreads throughout the room at that revelation. She thinks about the warm white light and the harsh but welcoming flames and the gentle arms of her father and giving up happiness. “It didn’t take.”

“You  _ died?”  _ Sue squeaks. Her eyes are huge and her fists are clenched so tightly her knuckles are almost white. Cynthia hardly knows her. Met her once and found her a little too… Chirpy. But there’s no way in hell that she’s used to all of this. Used to metahumans and monsters and criminals stalking her streets. From her little introduction the last-and first-time they met, she just moved here from Detroit, and Detroit is probably a  _ lot  _ calmer than Central City.

“I died once,” Cynthia repeats. She’s exhausted. Not as exhausted, or as dead, as she should be if she was facing down the Imperium on her own, if she had been forced to kill herself to kill that monster, but… Really, it’s not far off. “Like I said, it didn’t stick. Someone else’s god saved me. Now that ze’s helped me kill the Imperium, I owe zem twice as much.”

Cisco sits down heavily in the space between Iris and Barry, which they left for him. He fits perfectly. As she watches, Iris takes a hold of his hand and Barry wraps his arm around Cisco’s shoulders. Cisco’s still in his pajamas. Cynthia’s in his clothes. It’s uncomfortable-the shirts are fine, shirts can be worn by anyone, she  _ likes  _ wearing his shirts, but they’re pants for men, and even though she’s worn pants like this a hundred times it’s still… Uncomfortable and upsetting. She doesn’t let it show on her face, but she’s pretty sure Cisco can tell, since he gives her another apologetic look to go with the one he gave her when he handed her the pants in the first place.

“So how do we get rid of them? The foot soldiers you mentioned, I mean?” Wally-Kid-Flash asks. He’s perched next to Cecile, who’s sitting at the kitchen table. Wally’s forgone chairs altogether and is sitting on the actual table itself. Every few seconds, Joe gives him a disapproving look because of it. Wally doesn’t seem too bothered. “Do we have to explode them like you and the, um, god exploded the-uh, the Imperium?”

“They’ll die if they’re exposed to high amounts of ultraviolet radiation,” Cynthia says. She crosses her arms. “Like sunlight. But… The Imperium dies when exposed to UV light too, and it seemed like it had… An immunity, or something. And whatever it was looking for inside of STAR Labs, whatever person or thing it was trying to kill-its soldiers will come for it.”

Sue fiddles with the bottom edge of her teal paisley hijab and bites her lower lip. “Cool. Cool.” She looks at Ralph who pats her hand comfortingly and smiles at her. “I’m gonna have to get used to a lot of alien invasions, aren’t I?”

“It’s not an alien invasion,” Iris points out grimly. “Not anymore. They already invaded. We just have to smoke them out. Cynthia, do you have any idea where they might be?”

That’s when Cynthia realizes that every single person in the room is looking at her. She looks back and forth between Cisco and Iris. Cisco’s got an encouraging grin on his face, eyes wide and soft, while Iris has her lips set into a thin line, the hand that’s resting on top of Cisco’s forced into relaxation while her other hand is clenched into a fist. She must be terrified.

She swallows. Fuck. “No,” she admits. “I don’t. Somewhere cool and dark, out of the sun, but… I don’t know. Their walkers are different, they’re pretty easy to spot, but the actual ground troops are probably stationed away somewhere.” Cynthia starts pacing. “The Imperium wouldn’t come out like this unless it was saving its troops for… Something. I don’t know what. Whatever it wanted inside of STAR Labs, whatever it didn’t get, the troops were waiting for it to be retrieved so they could…” She trails off, frustrated. “I don’t know. Use it for something.”

“Do you have any idea what it was?” Iris is shifting into leadership mode. Cynthia straightens and stops walking. This is familiar. Being questioned by a superior officer is familiar. She can do this, even if it is a little bit of a shock to her system to think of Iris as a superior officer. “What they could have been looking for? And how we can stop them from ever getting it?”

“It was a person,” Cynthia reports. Her voice becomes flatter and more monotone. “It stopped trying to attack the lab when it realized that everyone inside of it had been breached to safety, so it couldn’t have been after something else inside the lab, otherwise it would have kept attacking. Who were the people inside the lab at the time, Ma’-” Cynthia stops herself and grits her teeth. No, no, no. “Who were the people inside the lab at the time, _ Iris?” _

“Me,” she says, counting off. “Barry. Ralph. Wally. Sue. Cisco, for the few seconds before he got us to safety, but it started attacking before he arrived.”

Cynthia starts her pacing back up again. “Alright. Barry, Ralph, Wally, Sue, and you. Okay.”

This morning had started out so  _ good.  _ This morning had started out so  _ good.  _ This morning had started out so  _ good. _

“I think it would be best if we stayed away from the wreckage of STAR Labs for now,” Iris says slowly. “Barry owns the building so  _ someone  _ will tell him it’s destroyed, but since it’s so… Completely ruined, they probably won’t be able to tie it to the Flash at all, right? Wally, Barry, you two do cleanup there-not of the Imperium-and make sure nothing can blow our cover and then  _ don’t  _ go back there.”

“I’m not gonna be in any danger just-like-walking down the street, right?” Sue pauses and corrects herself. “Well, you know. Any more danger. Are aliens going to just start crawling out of alleyways? Do I have to start bringing my baseball bat out in public with me in case I see one?”

Cynthia raises an eyebrow. If Sue really  _ does  _ have a baseball bat that she’s willing to carry around with her, Cynthia’s opinion of her has just increased by a whole lot. She shakes her head in answer to Sue’s question. “No. They won’t come out unless the sun is sufficiently covered, so be careful at night, but I assume you already are.”

Sue nods thoughtfully. Ralph whispers something into her ear and she claps her hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter. Cynthia looks back at Cisco, who gives her a nervous thumbs up. Iris reaches the hand that’s not holding Cisco’s over to her husband and rests it on his shoulder. Connecting them. Grounding them. Cynthia suppresses the longing in her chest to be a part of that circuit.

“Should we leave?” Joe asks. Cynthia had forgotten that he was even in the room with them. She looks at Cisco for direction-this was  _ his  _ house after all, she was still basically just a guest here. She knew about aliens, not about how Cisco would feel about everyone still being here. “As much as I don’t like it, it doesn’t sound like there’s very much we can do except wait for those alien ground forces to attack.”

Cynthia nods at that. All they can do is wait. There’s no real way to track the walkers. Without the Imperium, some of them will probably die off, but there’s no telling how many are on Earth, what they were going after, and when they’ll attack. It’s frustrating, of course, but it can’t really be helped. Once she tells her dad about this, though, he’ll probably have some tips. Oh, god, her  _ dad.  _ He’s going to be so upset to find out about…

“If something happens, call,” Iris says. She looks directly at Cynthia as she says it. Cynthia’s not quite sure why it’s so hard for her to meet Iris’s gaze or even look in her direction. “We’ll let everyone know if something happens on our end.”

“Same here,” Ralph pipes up, and Sue nods in agreement as she leans into her boyfriend’s side. Cynthia decides she likes Sue. She’s nice and she seems like if it came down to it she could hold her own in a fight at least for a little while, despite her pastels and flowery charm bracelet.

Wally and Joe and Cecile agree to call quickly, and everyone seems to have just assumed that Cisco had agreed when Cynthia did (which he had), and the impromptu gathering started to dissipate-except for Caitlin, who hadn’t said anything and didn’t move from her chair even as Wally gave first Cecile and then Joe a lift back to their house as Barry did the same for Ralph and Sue.

Iris, Caitlin, Cisco, and Cynthia stay positioned in a rough square, with Cynthia looking back and forth between Iris and Caitlin, unsure of what they want. Iris probably wants to make sure Cisco’s okay, and Barry will probably be back at any second to ensure the same thing, but she’s not sure why Caitlin hasn’t made any moves to leave.

Caitlin looks at her, expression unreadable. “I need to know how injured you are. Cisco wouldn’t let me examine you for some reason”-she glares at him as she says it and Cisco looks at Cynthia with a weak smile that fills her with relief because it means he really didn’t let anyone see, thank god; it’s not like she really doubted him but there’s always that lingering feeling-“after we got you back here.”

“I’m fine,” Cynthia says truthfully. She looks directly at Iris, not at Caitlin, when she says it. “I’ll need to sleep for awhile, but I’m not hurt. H’ronmeer likes zer vessels to be in good condition when ze enters them, and even though it takes energy when ze leaves and it means ze won’t come back, it doesn’t leave any outward physical injuries.”

Cisco confirms it for her when Caitlin frowns in disbelief and shakes her head slowly. “I saw when I put her in my tub, there’s hardly a scratch on her ‘cept for older scars. And those don’t count. Fatigue’s just a normal side effect of our powers, anyway. Of  _ most  _ powers. She’ll be fine once she sleeps it off.”

Cynthia doubts Cisco actually truly believes that, realizing that instead he’s just repeating what she’s already told him and trying to trust that she’ll be right about it. It makes something in her gut get warm.

Barry gets back, moving to pick up Caitlin and take her first. She lets him, chiding him about how he’s holding her once he picks her up before he can whisk her away. Iris looks at where he disappeared from before sighing.

“Sit,” she says softly, and it takes Cynthia about thirty seconds for her to realize that she’s talking to her. Slightly baffled, she sits down on Cisco’s other side. He hooks one ankle around hers. Comforting.

Barry gets back and somehow automatically knows to sit down on Iris’s other side. The two of them both look at Cisco and then at her. Cisco blinks. “What?”

“Well, uh-for one thing, I kinda want to go out on a date with you tonight,” Barry mumbles. “You being Cisco,” he adds, like he’s worried Cynthia will assume he’s asking her. “Iris said she had a great time with you and-yeah. If you’re free tonight. But Iris also wanted to-”

“I wanted to make sure you were okay, Cindy,” Iris interrupts. Barry nods his head fast in agreement with his wife. Cynthia opens her mouth and Iris holds up her hand. “I know you say you’re okay when it comes to the Imperium fight, and I believe you, but I wanted to make sure you were really okay with this… New arrangement between me, Cisco, and Barry.”

“Oh!” Cynthia blinks fast and hunches her shoulders inward. “Of-of course I am. It makes Cisco happy. I want him to be happy. And it makes you-you and Barry happy. And I want you to be happy. Of course I’m okay with it.”

“What about you?” Iris asks seriously. “Are you happy? Barry and Cisco and I are happy, but are you happy? Are you really okay with this relationship. Do you… Do you want to be a larger part of it? You said you thought that one day you could love us, too. Do you still feel that way?”

“...Cisco’s happy. That makes me happy.” Cynthia furrows her eyebrows. “If Cisco’s happy, I’m happy.” She swallows as the rest of what Iris said clicks into place. “I don’t-I don’t have any romantic feelings for Barry. I don’t think I ever will. It just doesn’t… Click with me like it does for the three of you.”

“And for me?” Iris doesn’t blink, but she does purse her lips and grip Barry’s hand tight enough that he winces a little bit.

Cynthia doesn’t say “I don’t know.” She doesn’t say “We all might die soon and I think I’d rather burn than live without knowing if we could try to have something.” She doesn’t say “Let me think about it.” Or “What feelings do you have for me?” Or even “no” or “yes.”

Instead, she moves forward a little bit on the couch with her upper body turned so she’s facing Iris. It feels like she’s moving underwater as she reaches over Cisco’s lap out to touch Iris’s cheek and realizes that she’s looking at the most beautiful woman in the world. Touching the most beautiful woman in the world. Cisco makes a small soft wet noise at the back of his throat as Cynthia leans over him until she can feel Iris’s breath on her face.

“Can I kiss you?” She breathes out, thinking about how Iris’s husband and their shared boyfriend are both right there. Thinking about how even though she knows that, even though she can feel Cisco’s heartbeat through her palm where she’s placed the hand that’s not caressing Iris’s face on his thigh to balance herself, even though she can see Barry’s wide eyes, it still feels like they’re the only two people in the whole wide world.

Iris nods a tiny bit. Cynthia can hardly even see it, but she can feel it against her skin. Iris is the one who closes the gap between them, kissing her softly before pulling back and looking her in the eyes. This time, Cynthia’s the one who nods, the little knot in her chest that’s been there since she was fourteen loosening the way it does whenever anyone asks her if she’s okay with what’s happening.

Iris kisses her again, and for a moment Cynthia can close her eyes and forget the alien invasion and the dead Martian god who she now owes twice over and her father and her mother and everything she has ever done. For a moment, Iris pulls her out of orbit and back down to Earth.

“Wow,” Cynthia murmurs breathlessly as soon as she can breathe again. As soon as her heart starts beating again. Iris lowers her gaze and tries to suppress her giant grin as it spreads across her face. “I think that answers your question.”  _ And mine.  _ “That was-”

“Yeah,” Iris finishes. She giggles a little like this was her first time kissing anyone. Cynthia notices how tight the grip she has on Cisco’s thigh has gotten and makes sure to let go, settling back into her spot. Iris still has Barry’s fingers in a deathgrip. “It was. It really, really,  _ really  _ was.”

Cynthia can feel her heartbeat in her throat and it’s almost overwhelming. Like in a few seconds she’s going to have to take a break or  _ something  _ so her lungs don’t explode out of her chest. Seeming to sense her distress, Cisco wraps his arms around her and squeezes her tightly. Iris pulled her out of orbit with her kiss-Cisco makes sure she stays down on the ground with the rest of them.

“If you’d like to go out on a real date with me when this alien infestation is over,” Cynthia whispers, voice steadier than she ever expected it to be. “I would love to do something with you.”

Iris reaches for Cynthia’s hand and curls their littlest fingers together like they’re two little kids making an unbreakable promise. “I would love to.”

Of course, the next day is when it all goes to hell.

* * *

 

“The little lights aren’t working!” Ralph shouts from where he’s curled like a snake going up the pillar of a building, frantically waving his tiny UV flashlight around to no avail. Sue is leaning against the base of the pillar shouting similar things, fighting back the approaching aliens with more success than her boyfriend but not by much.

“I think he’s right,” Wally calls as he herds a little group of alien ground troops into a ring and fries them with lightning. “They’re not strong enough! The lightning does a lot of damage, but I think that’s just because lightning does damage to pretty much everything.”

“Fuck.” Cynthia drops her little UV light and slams two blasts into an approaching alien. “There’s too many of them for us to fight over here.” She taps her earpiece. “Cisco, are you guys having any more luck?”

“Nope, they’re swarming us. But I think we know what they’re after now-it’s Barry! He keeps trying to blast them with lightning and they get hurt, yeah, but it makes all of them look at him and then charge every time,” Cisco pants. “We have to draw their attention back onto us by taking out a few more of them.”

The aliens had attacked at midnight, just as the moon went behind a cloud. There hadn’t been reports yet of attacks on other cities like Star or Vanity or Fawcett or New York, so they were clearly concentrating their efforts on Central, but Cisco made sure to keep an ear out anyway. He’d contacted Cynthia on Earth-19 to tell her that the aliens were launching their assault, and she hadn’t even thought for a second before breaching away to help.

But there had been more than she had ever thought there would be-or perhaps this was the same number that had attacked her Earth so long ago, but since it was all so concentrated in only Central City it felt like more than it was-and the lights Cisco had handed out weren’t strong enough to do anything. If you managed to trap one inside a beam, it would smoke and sizzle and burn and let out an ear piercing screech but it wouldn’t  _ die,  _ not like they were supposed to. 

Which meant that it was time for Cynthia to call in some backup.

Ralph and Sue watch from their position surrounded by enemies as she opens a breach and steps through it easily, leaving them behind to deal with the Imperium’s ground troops alone. Wally’s probably halfway across the city by now.

“I really don’t want to die,” Sue whispers, watching as every single head previously turned to watch Cynthia’s bright blue bubbling breach swivels to look at her and Ralph. “And I  _ especially  _ don’t want to die at the hands of aliens.”

Ralph scoops her up and sets her high above the concrete within his coils, as safe as he can get her. He squeezes up a little higher before realizing that there’s really nowhere else to go. At least they were out of the reach of the alien horde. For now, at least. “She’ll be back sooner or later, right?”

Sue angles her light down and winces as the aliens shy back away from it but don’t really get hurt by it. “‘Not getting caught in an alien invasion’ should have been on my list of ways to avoid dying, huh?”

“What are your other ways?” Ralph asks, trying to distract them both from the fact that Wally is nowhere to be seen, their other backup is gone, and they’re probably going to die here, killed by these aliens. At least neither of them will die alone.

Sue frowns a little and opens her mouth. “Well-”

A breach opens right where Cynthia’s first one was and twin glowing streaks shoot out of it, followed by Cynthia stepping down onto the ground and planting her hands on her hips. “Did I miss anything cool?” She shouts up to the two of them, before grinning when both Ralph and Sue shake their heads. “Good. I just won this battle.”

One of the streaks stops in front of Ralph and Sue and turns into a glowing young man with dark skin and pure white eyes behind his yellow helmet. He adjusts the collar of his gold and black and white jacket and sticks out his hand, which neither of them shake. “Hey! Great to meet you! I’m Ray!”

“...Hi,” Ralph replies, exchanging a glance with Sue. “I’m, uh, the Elongated Man. Please don’t call me that, though. I’m Ralph. This is Sue. She’s the light of my life.” Sue grins into her hands and squirms a little bit at the compliment. “Who’s the other guy?”

“Great to meet you!” Ray repeats as he beams again, megawatt smile quite literally lighting up the street, and points to where the person he had come out of the breach alongside is now knocking over alien invaders like they’re nothing more than fleshy dominos. “That’s Triumph. He’s kind of the worst, but I love him anyway.”

Across the street, Triumph jokingly flips him off. Ralph looks back and forth between them. “Uh, okay, then. Are you two Cynthia’s friends?”

Triumph speeds over to them, pausing in the air beside Ray and looking like every picture of an All-American white bread superhero that Sue has ever seen. “Better than that,” he says with a little smirk that does nothing except make him somehow  _ more  _ handsome and square-jawed, “we’re her big brothers.”

The hand of an alien hooks onto Ralph’s midsection before he can register that, though not before Sue can mutter something under her breath that cuts off into a yelp of surprise when another alien hand grasps for her wrist.

“Hey!” Ray shouts, hands filling with white light so bright that Sue has to screw up her eyes, “Get away from them! This isn’t another world for you to colonize and destroy!”

Sue’s heart claws its way up into her throat as she blinks spots out of her eyes, the alien’s pale white hand literally boiling off of her sleeve. Ray and Triumph zoom away to dispatch more invaders, but it takes her about a minute to catch her breath, digging her fingers into Ralph’s shoulders so she doesn’t fall as he slowly heads back toward the ground, useless UV flashlight flickering in his hands.

“Are you okay?” He asks, twisting his neck around so he can look at her.

“I’m fine,” Sue promises, trying to shove all thoughts of lights and blinding supervillains out of her head. “Let’s kick some alien butt.”

Halfway across the city, standing on top of a building, Iris is trying very hard not to start swearing. She wouldn’t have usually cared if she did so or not, but considering that there was currently a very loudly crying six year old girl clinging to the back of her legs, she didn’t want to set a bad example. “Barry, how’s Cisco coming with Jesse?”

As if on cue, a breach opens beside her, and an exhausted Cisco steps out followed by a vibrating Jesse. She waves to Iris-who has just enough time to take in that she’s decided to get a new outfit, fitted with a yellowish visor over a black mask and large boots and a very startling lack of pants-before shooting off, vanishing down the side of the building.

Iris rests her hand on Cisco’s shoulder, relieved to find that the child she snatched out of alien hands is no longer crying its eyes out and is instead watching Jesse’s trail of lightning, fascinated. “You don’t have to keep doing this,” she says softly. “I’m sure Cindy would be happy to breach to Earth-3. I can tell you’re exhausted.”

“Not as much as Barry must be by now,” Cisco points out, chest heaving as he reaches up to brush his sweaty hair back from his forehead. His goggles dig into his nose and around his eyes, and all he wants to do is curl up in his bed and sleep for a week, drained from all the breaching and blasting he’s had to do, but the aliens just keep coming. “I need to get to Earth-3. If I give up before my last stop for the night-”

Iris pulls him into a kiss, curling her bare fingers together with his gloved ones. The little kid makes a disgusted sound and they both laugh a little. Iris brushes her thumb against Cisco’s lip when she pulls away. “I’m not losing you tonight, okay? Not over something as stupid as a measly little alien invasion.”

Cisco laughs again and wipes away at the blood that is just starting to drip from his nose. “Don’t worry. I’ve been more exhausted than this.  _ You  _ get that kid to safety. I’ve got some more speedsters to track down.”

Down below in the streets, Jesse zigzags before coming up on Barry’s right side, falling in next to him. “Like the new look?” She calls, jumping ahead of him with a burst of speed and running backward so he can see. “My friend Rick helped me pick it out!”

“Very nice!” Barry compliments, before turning on his heel and running left. Jesse follows him, feet dancing over the ground as she presses close behind him, the speed force humming in her veins. Wally’s there in three seconds, and the three of them fan out into a V-shape with Wally at the center. “Anybody got a plan?”

“I think I have an idea,” Wally says, pausing to rescue two teenagers trying to outrun one of the aliens. “The lightning does damage against them, right? And across the city, over by where Ralph and Sue are, Cindy brought over two other Collectors, and one of them is basically a flying ball of UV radiation. We could use our lightning to try to herd all of them into one place, and then have him fry them all.”

“No way we could get all of them into one place, there’s just too many of them,” Barry disagrees before adding with a smile, “But if we did it with smaller groups that were as big as we could get them, it might work. It’s the best plan we’ve got, so let’s give it a try.”

They work as a team without even needing to speak to each other, Jesse taking a hard right and Barry skidding left while Wally keeps going straight until he hits a tight cluster of alien foot soldiers trying to bite the head off of a homeless man. He pulls the bystander away and makes a tight circle, driving them together before pushing them as a group back in the direction that they came.

It takes longer than it should to get Ray to understand their plan. He was bright, both in the literal sense and in the intelligence department, but anyone would have difficulty understanding three speedsters chattering to them at two hundred miles per hour. But once he gets the gist of their plan he’s all for it, swooping low over the aliens to help herd them toward the center of the city. There’s a big town square there that’s hopefully large enough to fit all of them-and if it’s not, a little overflow will be worth it for the good of the entire goddamn world.

Jesse passes the plan along to everyone else-Cisco’s still on Earth-3 finding Jay and his protégé, but the others are still on-world, even if they’re all distracted by their own problems. Ralph and Sue found a little cluster of adult metahumans who decided to take this alien invasion thing into their own hands and seem torn between joining them and getting them to safety, Iris is still defending her rooftop, Cynthia and Triumph are in a competition to see who can take down the most aliens, and Caitlin’s funnelling bystanders to relative safety on high ground.

It doesn’t take too long to get most of the aliens in one place. Iris steps out of Cynthia’s breach and steadies herself on her shoulder, eyes narrowing down at the square steadily filling up with pale, pulsating bodies. “Doesn’t this seem a little messed up to you?”

Cynthia looks at her, head titling as she frowns. She’s breathing hard and there’s a cut on her forehead letting blood trickle down her face, but her eyes are alive and she hasn’t felt this good after a fight in months. It’s been too long since she fought beside people like this. “What do you mean?”

“I guess… I know they’re invading Earth, but…” Iris shakes her head. “We’re rounding them up like they’re cattle we’re about to slaughter. Doesn’t that feel wrong to you?”

Cynthia searches herself for any feelings of remorse and finds nothing but the fatigue that comes from using her powers. It probably wasn’t a good idea to overexert herself so much so quickly after letting H’ronmeer possess her, and even though she’s running on adrenaline the ache of her injuries is starting to wear through the joy of the battle. 

“No,” she answers honestly. She hesitates. “If it makes you feel any better, they’re not really alive at all anymore. Not in the way that counts. They were controlled by the Imperium, and since  _ that’s  _ dead, they’re operating on its dying orders. They’re just empty husks that it brought to life and set loose on the world to do whatever it wanted to do to Barry. Honestly, we’re probably just putting them out of their misery.”

Ray alights on the top of a lamppost, balancing there on the toes of his heavy black boots. “Damn, Cinds, you should’ve called us sooner. I’ve never seen them react like that to any human before. That guy shouldn’t have been in the fight in the first place if  _ this  _ is how they’re treating him.”

“What do you-” Iris stops as she realizes what Ray is talking about. All of the aliens are eerily silent-she didn’t even realize that they were making noise before, but now she can tell they must’ve been for there to be such a harsh absence of it. All of them are turned to face Barry, a silent mass of unblinking and unmoving pulsating bodies. And then, as one, they take a single step toward her surprised husband. “Oh, Lord.”

“Ray,” Cynthia says grimly, scowling as Iris squeezes her hand so tightly it starts to hurt, not that she’ll tell Iris that, “light ‘em up.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” He takes flight again and cups his gloved hands around his mouth. “Hey, you! Speedster in red! No, the white guy! Yeah, you-they’re all focused in on you, so start circling around them. You don’t have to go too fast. Just keep them all there so I can fry the bastards, alright?”

Barry obeys, circling the overflowing square full of aliens at about half his regular speed, which is still pretty fast while Ray hovers high in the air above the cluster, trying to figure out the best angle to approach this from.

Cynthia gently turns Iris’s shoulders away from the square. “You shouldn’t be looking directly at him when Ray turns on the power. Unless you want to be blind.”

Iris nods a tiny bit, torn between wanting to make sure Barry is okay and not wanting her retinas seared. Cynthia looks at her, illuminated by Ray’s glow and the dull light of a moon halfway hidden behind the clouds, and pulls her into a kiss. They close their eyes when they hear a sound like a lightbulb exploding followed by the wails of the aliens and a loud cheer from off to the right that could have only come from Wally.

They open their eyes when Cynthia feels a breach open off to her left on the rooftop beside them. She steps back away from Iris but keeps their fingers intertwined as two streaks of lightning shoot out of it, the golden one fading out to reveal a smiling Jay Garrick who pats Iris on the shoulder in greeting while the purple and yellow lightning flickers to a halt in the remaining sludge of the aliens. A teenage girl glares up at them, hands on her hips.

“Are you  _ kidding me?  _ We  _ missed it?!”  _ She throws her hands up in the air. “And it was gonna be my very first alien invasion, too! This is your fault, Jay!”

Cisco stumbles out of the breach, which fizzes out of existence behind him. Cynthia and Iris rush to support him as his legs give out underneath him. “You guys had  _ better  _ not be telling me that I made that last breach trip for nothing, okay?”

“Don’t worry. Or, uh, do worry, because there are some aliens we definitely missed!” Ray calls down. “The speedsters couldn’t round up all of them. So they’ll probably still be out tonight-we’ve got some time until dawn when they’ll go back into hiding so they don’t die in the sunlight.”

A blur of purple, and then Jay’s protégé is standing on the roof with them. “Then what are we waiting for? I’ve wanted to kick some alien butt for  _ weeks- _ Kenan is gonna be  _ so jealous!”  _ She pulls on Jay’s arm. She’s hardly able to budge him but she gives it a valiant effort regardless. “C’mon, old man. This is a once in a lifetime thing for me! Let’s go!”

“Slow down, Avery,” Jay sighs. “There’ll always be another alien invasion for you to tell your friends you helped save the world from.” He sends an apologetic look in Iris and Cisco’s direction. “I’m sorry, she’s… Excitable.” Avery tugs harder on his arm and he follows her indulgently. “Alright, I’m coming. Let’s see how much of what I’ve taught you you actually  _ remember,  _ okay?”

They both ran off down the side of the building, Avery running in tight loops around Barry and Jesse and Wally as Jay stops to say hi. Iris laughs a little. “Was she like that on Earth-3 too?”

“I’m gonna be honest with you and say I think she might’ve been worse.” Cisco shakes his head and rests his cheek on Iris’s shoulder. “She seems like a good kid, but I hope she learns that not all interdimensional visitors are enemies before the next time I open a breach to her world. Good lord can that girl throw a punch.”

Iris strokes his hair, helping him sit down on the roof. Cynthia hangs back, suddenly unsure of what she’s supposed to be doing. Ray was right when he said that there were still aliens roaming the streets, and distantly she can see flashes of what might be magic from where Ralph and Sue are fighting, plus every now and then Wally sprints off and comes back with a confused looking innocent bystander, but… Cisco’s not like her.

Cisco’s not used to opening breaches. Cynthia wears her powers like a second skin. She’s had them her whole life, even if they weren’t active while she was a kid. She can’t imagine not having them, and the few times they’ve been stripped away from her via inhibitor collar or one of her mother’s punishments it was like a living nightmare.

But Cisco’s powers are, in the grand scheme of things, a recent development. Using them too much tires him out like it would with any metahuman but his ‘too much’ is half as much as her limit. They’ve both been opening breaches all night, but he’s the only one of the two of them who’s about to pass out. She  _ should  _ take a break because of her injuries, but her powers love a good fight like this, and they’re singing for her to jump back down there and join the rest of the team in tracking down the remaining alien footsoldiers. She gets it from her dad.

“Cindy, you okay?” Cisco looks up at her, limbs akimbo as he huddles closer to Iris in the chilly air. His nose is starting to bleed again, and he wipes at the blood absently with the back of his hand. His goggles are pushed up onto his forehead, with little marks around his eyes where they’d been pressed against his face for too long. “There’s some blood on your face..”

She nods and touches at it, rubbing her fingers together when they come back sticky and dark with blood. The injury on her forehead barely stings, it’s her legs and her ribs that are really making her want to join him in taking a nice, long break. “Yeah, it’s fine. Probably won’t even scar.”

“Come sit down,” Iris invites, patting the rooftop next to her. She tries to keep her own exhaustion out of her voice-she’s only been coordinating, not actually fighting the aliens unless they’d managed to crawl their way up to whatever high place she’d made a temporary home base. She shouldn’t feel as tired as she does, should she? “You’ve been working all night.”

_ “We’ve  _ been working all night,” Cynthia corrects. But she does come over and sit down on Iris’s other side, taking Cisco’s hand across Iris’s stomach. There’s a shout from someone they can’t see down on the ground, which Iris recognizes as coming from Barry. “We can’t rest for too long, we’ve got to-we’ve got to keep going, the aliens will go back into hiding at dawn like Ray said…”

“I don’t think I’m gonna be able to move from this spot,” Cisco says seriously. “I’m way past all breached out for the night. How’re you even still  _ standing?” _

“Practice,” Cynthia says simply. “You can stay here if you like. I’ve got a bet with Triumph that I want to win. I’m in the lead, but I have a feeling that if I wait around for any longer…” It’s the truth, but there’s also the crushing weight of the knowledge that she  _ will  _ get emotional and sappy if she sticks around, because that’s just how she  _ is  _ after a fight, and that is  _ not  _ something she wants Iris to see. Not yet. “If I win, he owes me twenty espresso shots.”

“I look forward to seeing you win and consume so much caffeine you start vibrating at a frequency that shouldn’t be possible.” Cisco squeezes her hand and then lets go. “Kick his ass, okay?”

“I will.” She smiles and stands and jumps right off the roof into a breach. Her powers aren’t the only thing she got from her dad, okay? His flair for the dramatic definitely runs in the family. Cisco’s seen it before, and she can hear him shouting  _ “showoff!”  _ as she disappears over the side, sliding through multiversal walls and landing neatly on her feet in front of Triumph. One day she’ll teach Cisco that trick.

“She’s incredible,” Cisco whispers, staring at the place where she vanished. Sleepily, he looks up at Iris, smiling a little sillily when she cranes her neck to look down at him.  _ “You’re  _ incredible too, Iris.” He closes his eyes and she shakes him a little-they have a Caitlin-instated rule about not falling asleep in dangerous situations in case they need to move quickly without much time to react, which includes on a damp rooftop in the middle of an alien invasion. “‘M not gonna go to sleep, don’t worry.”

“I know.” Iris kisses his forehead. There’s a crash from the streets below them followed by a very Barry-like shout of  _ “Wally!”  _ and suddenly they’re both laughing so hard they’re almost crying, relieved to be alive. Relieved that Barry is alive enough to get mad at Wally for accidentally knocking him off a roof into a dumpster. This alien infestation is in its final stretch-they can make it. They can do this. They can be the heroes for a little while longer.

Across the city, Cynthia blasts two aliens into each other. “Two more for me.”

Triumph lands heavily beside her, all powerhouse with none of the grace his glowing boyfriend possesses. “Just hit three more on the south side, so what’s our count at now?”

“Twenty nine-thirty three, my favor,” Cynthia says shortly, spinning around and blasting an alien trying to sneak up on her friend. They found a little pocket of them still lurking in a subway tunnel, practically killing each other in their desperation to get up to the surface world. She smiles at Triumph. “Twenty nine-thirty four, my favor. Someone’s losing their touch.”

Triumph rolls his eyes and knocks two aliens into each other as easily as if they were bowling pins. “So, which one of those idiots back there is your boyfriend?”

“Don’t call them idiots,” she corrects. She doesn’t like people who insult her friends, even if that’s  _ all  _ Triumph does. And… That’s what they are, aren’t they? She loves Cisco and Iris,  _ so much,  _ but the others… They’re her  _ friends.  _ They know her name. They don’t know everything about her yet, but she kind of wants them to. Not  _ everything  _ for  _ everyone  _ but at least… At least for Iris. Maybe for Barry, too, because Barry is important to Iris and Cisco. So he’s important to her. Maybe they could be important to each other outside of that one day. Not romantically, not like Iris and Cisco are important to her, but… But they could be important to each other. “They’re my friends.”

“I know.” Triumph blasts another alien in tandem with her and they fall in back to back, scanning for more enemies together the way that they have been trained to do. “But which one is your  _ boyfriend?  _ Cisco? The guy you wouldn’t stop talking about last time you got drunk with me, Ray, and Kate.”

“He was the one on the roof. The viber who brought the last two speedsters over.” Cynthia dodges a screaming drunk man who runs past her yelling about how the apocalypse is coming. Well, he wasn’t exactly  _ wrong,  _ the apocalypse just wasn’t going to be permanent.

Triumph sucks a breath in through his teeth. “Damn. He’s got your powers?” He breaks off to fly up into the air and drop an alien to its death. Cynthia doesn’t flinch when the body hits the street beside her. “How did your dad-Breacher, I mean, I  _ know  _ how the others would handle it-take that?”

“There were some… Misunderstandings.” Cynthia shrugs a little with a wry smile. “You know how my dad is. He interrupted us right before we were about to have sex, and then things just kind of… Got worse from there.” 

Triumph laughs, low and loud, shoulders shaking enough to actually lift him up off the ground as he doubles over in midair. “He totally hunted him, didn’t he?”

“You  _ know  _ he did.” Cynthia suddenly realizes that the aliens she’s trying to fight simply aren’t there and takes an off balance step into empty air when her punch doesn’t land. “What-”

Triumph points wordlessly at the horizon, where the first rays of the dawn sunlight are peeking through the buildings. The aliens still aboveground are all throwing themselves into the patches of light, skin bubbling and flesh hissing in a truly disgusting display.

“Ew.” Cynthia shakes her head. “I guess the Imperium must’ve pre-programmed them to…”

Triumph doesn’t ask her about the Imperium and she doesn’t tell him about her now ex guardian god. He doesn’t want to know. They’re siblings, he’s her brother in all but blood, just like Ray is, but there are some things about her that he’ll never know. And  _ she  _ doesn’t want to know everything about  _ him.  _ He’s got skeletons in his closet and it’s better for everyone if they remain undisturbed for the rest of their lives.

“Come on,” Triumph says, patting her on the shoulder with one hand before shoving her lightly to the side, “we’d better get back to our boyfriends.”

“If you’re trying to distract me from the fact that I definitely won our bet, it’s not going to work,” Cynthia says as she opens a breach back to the rooftop where she left Cisco and Iris, Barry’s voice crackling through the comm in her ear to tell her that everyone should meet back up at the square. Triumph can’t hear it, since they didn’t pass out comms to the newcomers, but he heads back in that direction anyway.

Barry skids to a halt on the rooftop where Cisco and Iris are. He bends down and kisses Iris first, smiling into her mouth when she leans up into him. Then he pulls back and sits down next to Cisco, kissing his cheek. “How’re you two holding up?”

“I’m so tired I think I’m going to go home and sleep for a year,” Cisco groans. He flops his neck sideways and tucks his face into Iris’s collarbone with a little whimper. Iris staunchly ignores that the blood from his nose is getting on her chest. “I just wanna take a nap. Forever. My head feels like it’s getting split in two. How does Cindy  _ do  _ this so fucking often? I think I’m dying.”

“Practice,” Cynthia answers, stepping out of her breach and kneeling down beside him to kiss his forehead and skate her thumb across Iris’s knuckles. “Like how you showed me those videos of Barry running into walls and tripping over his own feet when he first got his powers, but now he can do all sorts of things. Your power development is just… Delayed.”

“Hey!” Someone shouts from down below, and Barry peeks his head over the side of the roof. The little speedster, Avery, is standing on the ground with her hands cupped around her mouth. “Come down here and help me convince Jay that he should let me spend the rest of the day here on your Earth! My girlfriend is gonna be so jealous if he says yes!”

Barry gives his wife and his boyfriend a kiss each at superspeed and zips down to join her. Iris, Cisco, and Cynthia can hear him extolling the virtues of field trips to other universes-for academic purposes, of course!-loudly, his voice echoing in the empty streets.

Iris shakes her head a little, masking her huge yawn with one hand. “What a nerd.”

“You’re the one who married him,” Cisco points out, laughing sleepily as he snuggles more against her some more.

Cynthia huffs. “And you’re  _ both  _ dating him.”

“Fair enough.” Iris stands up despite Cisco’s little whine as he tries to cling to her and her own crushing exhaustion. “I have to… I don’t know. Organize where everyone’s going to go after tonight. For the morning. To sleep.” She shakes herself a little, trying not to give in to how tired she is. “I’ve gotta go be the leader.”

Suddenly, Cynthia wants nothing more than for her to stay here on this shitty freezing rooftop forever with her and Cisco keeping her safe. “Come to Cisco’s apartment after this,” she says instead of begging Iris to stay. The cold makes the words cling in her throat. “Bring Barry. Please. And I’ll-” She holds out one hand to Iris and opens a breach with the other. “I’ll take you down there. Cisco, too.”

Iris takes her hand and Cisco gets to his feet, leaning heavily on Iris. Jesse and Jay weren’t his only visits that night, but they were his toughest. Cynthia takes them down to the ground, her own powers making her palms sting and her temples ache. Oh, yeah, it’s definitely catching up to her. The crash is coming fast. There’s a reason she fell in love with coffee so fast, after all, and it’s definitely not the taste.

Everyone has gathered on the ground together-well, almost everyone, and when Iris asks who is missing Ralph tells her that Sue went home before sunrise-and is talking loudly among themselves when they get down there. Ray and Triumph are talking to each other, Caitlin is asking soft questions of the teenage girl Ralph brought back with him who’s wearing a hoodie with a big number  _ 13  _ on the back of it, Avery and Jesse and Barry are jabbering too fast for non-speedster ears to register, and as Cynthia watches Wally runs to hug his sister.

Cynthia may pay enough attention to what Iris is saying to know that Wally offered to let Ray and Triumph- _ Will,  _ he says when Ray elbows him,  _ if you like, you can call me Will- _ stay at Joe’s house with him and Cecile, which Iris thinks is a good idea even if Cynthia wonders what Joe will think about it. That she and Barry really are going to come to their-to  _ Cisco’s  _ apartment after this. That Jay gave in and that he and Avery will stay for a night with Caitlin (who’s worried about everyone’s various minor injuries), but Jesse’s going back to her Earth and promises to say hi to her team for them. But her real focus is all on Cisco.

She squeezes his hand. “So,” she says softly, as the group starts to disband, after she’s opened a breach to Earth-2 for Jesse to go home through, mostly uncaring of where she ends up since she can always just run to wherever she wants to go, “I guess it didn’t take very long for them to make me happy, huh?”

Cisco nods a little bit, ducking his head down so he can dig his forehead into her shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, they, uh, they can have that effect on people, I’ve found.”

Iris and Barry look at them in unison expectantly, fingers twined together. Softly, Barry says, “Maybe I could run us all to the loft instead of Cisco’s apartment? It’s, uh, closer…”

“Sure,” Cisco says as Cynthia nods a little beside him. “But do you think you could run me there first? I’m dead on my feet, man.”

“‘Course.” And then they’re both gone, leaving just Iris and Cynthia and the cold light of the daybreak above them and an empty street. She wonders if the people of Central City even know how close they were to death. She wonders if  _ Barry  _ knows how close he was to death. She wonders if Cisco felt what she felt-the speedforce in Barry’s cells reacting to the presence of the footsoldiers in a way that Wally and Jesse and Jay and Avery’s didn’t.

Cynthia is just about to ask Iris if she’d be okay with Cynthia kissing her right then and there in the middle of the frigid street when Iris is gone too in a flicker of lightning. This time she’s more vigilant, springing out of the way of Barry’s grasping hands when he tries to grab for her. He skids to a halt and looks at her, eyes wide and confused like he’s forgotten the last time she outsmarted him by doing almost exactly this.

“Don’t,” she says when he steps toward her again. He stops and she moves toward him, glancing around before standing up on her toes and pushing back his cowl with a frown. He has hat hair. Cowl hair. Whatever. “Hmm.”

“What?” He squints down at her.

“I’m not attracted to you,” Cynthia decides, “but I think I can like you. You can pick me up now.”

“...Alright.” He picks her up carefully and then she’s standing at the foot of the bed he and Iris share, almost faceplanting onto it from the sudden rush of dizziness. Fucking  _ speedsters  _ and their fucking  _ powers. _

Iris is curled up on the bed in pajamas Cynthia is fairly sure Barry dressed her in, looking up at her sleepily. One of her hands is dangling off the side of the bed, and Cynthia guesses Cisco was holding it before he started getting undressed. Since he doesn’t have any pajamas, he’s sticking with no shirt and boxers. And behind her, Barry’s tossing his costume into a closet in a pile that causes Cisco to make a soft affronted noise at the sight of his baby being treated so disrespectfully.

Cynthia’s stomach clenches. Will she be expected to undress too? She doesn’t know if she can do that. _ Clearly,  _ if Cisco is comfortable enough with taking off his shirt in front of them (and now curling up with Iris with a happy sigh), then they know he’s trans. They know and they’re not reacting badly or violently. They know and they’re fine with it. They know and they’re comfortable with it.

Something feels like it’s squeezing her ribs in and she shrugs off her jacket but leaves on everything else except her boots, which she kicks off. Maybe she could take off her shirt. Her breasts are on the smaller side since she hasn’t had any surgery but they wouldn’t be able to tell from that alone, would they? She’ll tell them, eventually, she knows she will, but she can’t yet. This is too new and she  _ can’t tell them yet.  _

“You can leave your shirt on,” Iris says, like she’s reading Cynthia’s mind. Like she can see all her fears. “Just rest. Cisco’s already asleep.” Barry nods from where he’s flopped down next to his wife, one hand tangled in Cisco’s hair in a way that honestly looks pretty uncomfortable for the both of them. “Just do what’s best for you, okay?”

Cynthia relaxes and nods and crawls in between Barry and Cisco. The blood on her face has dried up and she’s dimly aware that she’s getting it in Barry and Iris’s bed and yet she can’t really care. The adrenaline has all seeped out of her and now she’s just tired and achy.

Tomorrow there’ll be a city wide cleanup. Tomorrow they’ll have to explain what the hell that was. Tomorrow they’ll check on Joe and Cecile. Tomorrow Cynthia will make sure Ray and Triumph get home safely, and she’ll ask them to say hi to her other dads. Tomorrow Cisco will start theorizing about how the reason why the aliens wanted Barry so badly is because of his time in the speedforce prison. Tomorrow, she’ll make a proper offering to H’ronmeer, as a thank you to zem for blessing their mission with success.

But for right now, they’re just going to sleep in each other’s company, and that’s okay.


End file.
